Lib Dem peer loses bid to hand seat to 'new blood'

A Liberal Democrat life peer has been forced to abandon his attempt to set a precedent by resigning his peerage and letting a younger party colleague take his seat in the Lords.

Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a City solicitor and philanthropist who advised the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, will instead take permanent leave of absence from the Lords this month after Tony Blair refused his request to resign and hand over to "new blood".

"If you could create a vacancy for your party by resigning, a lot of peers would resign on that basis. What they don't want to do is deny their party a voice and vote," Lord Phillips said last night in an invitation to 150 fellow peers to his farewell party tomorrow.

The 67-year-old peer, who has campaigned on civil liberty issues since joining the Lords in 1998, said "it must seem perverse to withdraw, but no time is right". He cited a desire to spend more time at home in Suffolk and on other projects, but also said: "I find it frustrating having to labour to achieve marginal improvements (as they usually are) to cascades of legislation which are collectively counter-productive. Being endlessly the critic also goes against the grain."

One of Lord Phillips's complaints has been about both "quality and quantity" of Westminster legislation, which amounts to 13,000 pages a year and is far more than most parliaments pass. Though the ID cards bill was lost on the tide of "ludicrous excess of legislative effluent", Lord Phillips believes that Lords debate will eventually prove to have turned public opinion against the project.

Hereditary peers, all but 92 of whom have been expelled by Labour reforms, have been able to resign their peerages for more than 40 years. The precedent was created by Tony Benn, Viscount Stansgate, after a long legal and political battle. But "lifers" cannot, and suggestions that the next stage of Lords reform may require a mass retirement to better balance party numbers have met with hostility.